West Marches: Running Your Own

Alarming fact: brave GMs all over the place are taking up the torch and starting their own West Marches games. Scary isn’t it?

I’ve already had some private email conversations about how one would actually build and run a West Marches of their very own. Maybe you’ve got the bug too. Early symptoms include a desire to build vast wilderness areas and enlist hordes of players to explore it. Sound familiar? Then read on for a few (hopefully) helpful tips:

Building It

make town safe and the wilds wild — Having the town be physically secure (walled or in some cases protected by natural features like rivers or mountains) is very useful for making a sharp “town = safe / wilderness = danger” distinction. Draconian law enforcement inside town, coupled with zero enforcement in the wilds outside town, also helps. Once you are outside the town you are on your own.

keep NPC adventurers rare — Or even better non-existent. It’s up to the players to explore the wilderness, not NPCs. As soon as you have NPCs going on adventures of their own you move the focus away from player-initiated action. NPC adventurers also makes it harder to explain why interesting things weren’t already discovered — players love being the first to find the Horned Tower or the Abbot’s Study. Keep this in mind when you devise the background for your region. Is it a newly opened frontier? Or is adventuring just something no one in their right mind does in this world (the West Marches premise)?

build dungeons with treasure rooms, locked rooms, pockets of danger — A solid party may be able to wipe out the primary critters in a dungeon, but there should always be spots that are a lot harder to clear. On those rare occasions when a group _does_ manage to clear a dungeon or crack a treasure room, they will stand on the tables in the tavern and cheer, not in some small part to brag to the other players who weren’t on that sortie.

Running It

appear passive — The world may be active, but you the GM should appear to be passive. You’re not killing the party, the dire wolf is. It’s not you, it’s the world. Encourage the players to take action, but leave the choices up to them. Rolling dice in the open helps a lot. The sandbox game really demands that you remain neutral about what the players do. It’s their decisions that will get them killed or grant them fame and victory, not yours. That’s the whole idea.

provide an easy lead to get new players started — Once players are out exploring, each new discovery motivates them to search more, but how do you get them started? Every time I introduced a batch of new players I gave them a very basic treasure map that vaguely pointed to somewhere in the West Marches and then let them go look for it. Whether it was the dwarven “treasure beyond bearing” or the gold buried beneath the Red Willow, a no-brainer “go look for treasure here” clue gets the players out of town and looking around. Of course once the players are in the wilds, they may find that getting to that treasure is much harder than it looks.

the adventure is in the wilderness, not the town — As per the discussion of NPCs above, be careful not to change the focus to urban adventure instead of exploration. You can have as many NPCs as you want in town, but remember it’s not about them. Once players start talking to town NPCs, they will have a perverse desire to stay in town and look for adventure there. “Town game” was a dirty word in West Marches. Town is not a source of info. You find things by exploring, not sitting in town — someone who explores should know more about what is out there than someone in town.

let the players take over — Don’t write game summaries, don’t clean up the shared map. You want the players to do all those things. If you do it, you’ll just train them not to.

competition is what it’s all about — Fair rewards, scarcity, bragging rights — these are the things that push the game higher. You could have a “solo” West Marches game with just one group doing all the exploring, and it would probably be a fun and pleasant affair, but it’s _nothing_ compared to the frenzy you’ll see when players know other players are out there finding secrets and taking treasure that _they_ could be getting, if only they got their butts out of the tavern. (Hmm, is this why I get a kick out of running Agon? It’s true, I’m a cruel GM.)

require scheduling on the mailing list — It doesn’t matter whether a bunch of players agreed to go on an adventure when they were out bowling, they have to announce it on the mailing list or web forum (whichever you’re using for your scheduling). This prevents the game from splintering into multiple separate games. If you notice cliques forming you can make a rule requiring parties to mix after two adventures. Conversely if you notice players being dropped from follow-up sorties too often just because some people can’t wait to play, you can require parties to stay together for two adventures. That forces a little more long time strategy in party selection, less greedy opportunism. Season to taste.

fear the social monster — This is the big, big grand-daddy or all warnings: even more so than many games, West Marches is a social beast. In normal games players have an established place in the group. They know they are supposed to show up every Tuesday to play — they don’t have to think about that or worry about whether they “belong” in the group. On the other hand West Marches is a swirling vortex of ambition and insecurity. How come no one replied when I tried to get a group together last week? Why didn’t anybody invite me to raid the ogre cave? And so on and so on ad infinitum. The thrilling success or catastrophic failure of your West Marches game will largely hinge on the confidence or insecurity of your player pool. Buckle up.

Running your own West Marches game? Post a link in the comments so everyone can take a look and grow green with envy. I’ve got some links I need to post but if you hurry you can beat me to it.

Long answer: In West Marches, there’s a lot of exploration, not just battle map combat, and 4th is geared much more heavily towards the combat side of things. Plus it has pretty rigid expectations about balance, which also doesn’t fit West Marches.

3rd had great rules for attribute loss, exhaustion, etc. that could model attrition and resource management without just inflicting hit point damage. Do you still keep going if you’re Fatigued and -2 on Dex from swamp fever, even if you’re at full hit points? When you’re picking a system for West Marches, granular resource management is a good thing to look for.

Hey Ben! I am formulating a WM game and had a question for you — if you were to start a West Marches game right now, would you use 4th edition or 5th? I love the combat and the inherent rewards of leveling present in 4th, however if I want to make Magic items more sought-after and truly make PCs feel more like small fish in a big pond, 5th starts the players as low as they can get and gives much more meaningful magic item boosts. What would your reasons be for choosing one over the other? Side note: a substantial percentage of players may be new, or have only experienced 5e.

For the record, I only think of 4e and 5e because those are the editions I’ve played — not planning on using PF for this campaign.

Charles: I think the important thing is that no aspect of the West Marches model is set in stone, or more important than playing in a style that works for your group and situation.

I encouraged people to return at the end of each session, but we did have cases where groups stayed out for more than one session. But the price was that they had so schedule again with the same group. The trick was to avoid having that become the norm, because then you really just have separate adventuring groups — the scheduling lock-in alone was a pretty strong incentive to get back. If more double-session adventures works for your group, give it a try.

Another thing to watch out for is the “congo line” where one or a few players are leading different groups back to the same place. For the returning players it’s a continuing exploration, but they may naturally want to rush past the “known” parts, which means the other players are just along for the ride for a chunk of the adventure. The experienced players may start treating them as interchangeable parts to round out the party, which is no good.

Heyo! So, I started a West Marches game of my own. The campaign has been going strong for some months now, and the players are going on adventures almost every weekend.

However, we’re hitting a snag in one area of the game. The problem is: how does the group deal with a session that doesn’t wrap up nicely?

For example, in a normal campaign, if players have to go home while their characters are still in the middle of a large dungeon, they can just end the game there and return where they left off the next week. But in a West Marches game, this clearly isn’t possible, since adventurers need to return to town in-between sessions.

For now, I’ve instituted the (metagame) rule that everyone must leave the dungeon and return to town at the end of the session, and they can come back with a different party some other time if they choose. But this solution is driving my players nuts, because it causes them to rush through things they wouldn’t normally rush through in the hopes of finding “the loot” that they suspect must be present in any given dungeon.

Since they only have around four real-life hours to get to the adventure site, retrieve all the gold pieces they can carry, and get out, it puts a lot of strain on them and on me to push the game forward, often at the sake of the story and the “juice” of the game itself.

How was this situation handled in the original West Marches campaign / how have other people dealt with this issue?

[…] with enough knowledge for players to chose a direction that suits their goals. In his influential West Marches campaign, Ben Robbins never started players empty handed. “Every time I introduced a batch of new players, […]

First of all, thanks for this awesome site and the WM section in particular.

There’s one thing I’m wondering about: Do the PCs ever find anybody (or maybe sometimes anything) to talk to outside town? I just found that there should not be NPC adventurers (which seems reasonable), but what about hermits, tribes, outcasts?

For example, at http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/81/grand-experiments-west-marches-part-4-death-danger/ you mention danger pockets that are well known – does this mean well known back in town, or to some other source of information outside?
And who named the regions ingame? Is there enough geographic knowledge in town, did the players name them, or someone else? Or are the names metagame knowledge that appears on this site, but would not generelly be used ingame?

[…] insofar as you can while not overstepping into player territory. We will see later that, just as Ben Robbins wrote regarding re-using physical territory in his West Marches game, Jamison emphasizes re-using character territory in his gaming […]

That could work. The biggest shift is in mindset: switching to understanding that you have to make your own decisions rather than wait for the plot to find you, plus judging risk and deciding when to run. I would be more concerned that people who were used to the more traditional campaign wouldn’t make the sharp adjustment if it was the same world.

My friends and I want to start our own West Marches but they are set on the idea of placing it on our “already enstablished” campaign setting because we have put quite an amount of effort on it and we dont want to throw it out and so that if one of the new players enjoys the setting he can transition from the West Marches to the “Weekly Ongoing Campaign” by traveling “east”. Can ,in your opinion, the West Marches work under these circumstances? or is it better to set them in a new setting and why?

How much character development centered roleplay did your “West Marches” have? I am thinking about scaling back the simulationist aspects of it ( Hand waving encumbrance and playing with the rules light “World of Dungeons”) and adding some roleplay centered mechanics (Flags from Dungeon World) because I more support for roleplay. Thoughts?

@ Max A: Sometimes parties stayed in the wilds for more than one session, but they were of course required to get another game scheduled with the same people and couldn’t join other expeditions (or report their adventures to the group) until they got back.

One very distant and risky expedition to the Sacred Lakes spanned three sessions, and a bad trip getting captured at the Sunken Fort also went to three, but I don’t think anyone stayed out for four.

A player recently pointed me to this post, and I’ve been thinking about running a game like this for some time.

My one big question is, is every single expedition a single session? Is every wandering into the wilderness plus dungeon crawl handled in one day/night of play? Due to logistics, sessions with my current group run a couple of hours, and I imagine it would be hard to have a satisfying mini-adventure with a single group of players in one nights.

@ Scholz: Hmm, not sure how adventure planning would work. If all the players are new they have no idea where to go unless you give them the old “treasure map” hook. You could do something weird like draw from a deck to give the players two or three destinations to chose from.

I think the big issue is adjusting to expectations of danger. Most new players are going to expect a “fair” adventure with nothing but winnable encounters. They don’t expect to have to decide whether to run away. This happened in the original West Marches some too. It worked best when new players played with at least one returning player who could give them the heads-up. A player warning against danger is totally different than the GM doing it. Not sure how to solve that with open pickup groups except to include that warning in your pitch.

Rereading this, and pleased to see the comments still active!
I’m moving to a new city without any established gaming group or friends. There is a good game store with tables and regular game nights. Do you think having a weekly “open table” meetup style game would work for a West Marches style game? It would obviously lack the pre-planning elements, which is big. But, on the other hand, scheduling would not be an issue.
What sort of design differences would you incorporate?

@ Ed: Yes, parties had to return to town at the end of each session. There were a few cases where we intentionally broke that rule and a party stayed out for a few sessions, which meant those players were locked in to scheduling another session together.

Sorry if I’ve missed this somewhere, but during the campaign was there a house rule to the effect that the party had to return to town at the end of each game session? I’m just wondering how the ad hoc nature of your sessions would work if the party stayed in the wilderness from session to session. Thanks.

I definitely used topography but only on the broad scale, not down to every inch. I always thought in terms of elevation because that worked for me for visualizing how the different terrains clicked together — how rivers flowed down from the mountains, why all of Cradle Wood was on a sharp incline, why there was a lake hidden in the middle of Pike Hollow, etc.

I’ve been working on the map for my game, but I can wavering between two styles I’m thinking of using.

On the one hand there is the option to map out the exact topography like Lord Kilgore did for the Bone Hill module centered around Restenford: http://www.lordkilgore.com/restenford-area. This will give me a lot of granularity when letting players know the geography – “The summit of the nearest hill is two miles away to the north and covered with a copse of trees. To your south is a steep valley with the slope beginning half a mile from your current position…” However, this is going to require a great deal of work, mapping the contours of every slope.

The other option is to keep it somewhat vague with each area having a stated geography but no specifics, similar to Louisville D&D’s (another West Marches-ish game) player map: http://louisvillednd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Player%27s_Map. This has the benefit of not needing near as much work to map out the detail, but I lose the capability of giving unchanging geographic features.

Anyways, I was curious how detailed your map was. Did your master map just have a general lay of the land with notable features marked, or did you work out the exact topography?

@Paul: It’s a pretty universal question about encounters. Most RPGs have their own systems for handling it, but the age-old rule is to determine 1) how far apart the two parties are, and 2) who spots who first.

Once you know those two things — plus the nature of the creatures involved — the situation starts to write itself. When in doubt, be neutral and true to the world, as always. Owlbears behave like owlbears, goblins behave like goblins, etc. But no, none of that was in the tables.

Hi Ben, just found your series on the West Marches – thanks for sharing, this is really interesting stuff! How much effort did you put into the random encounters tables, from the perspective of making the encounter more interesting than “you come across an owlbear, roll for initiative”? It seems to me that part of the fun of this environment is in the exploration and the adversity that comes getting from Point A to Point B, but doesn’t that come with a ton of setup and prep work? Or are you just good at thinking on your feet that way? I’m trying to figure out a way to minimize the really granular level prep-work but still keep things fresh and interesting… in the owlbear example, rolling for an owlbear on the random encounter table could be that you find owlbear tracks (do you want to follow them), or that you come across an owlbear nest (she’ll fight to the death but won’t chase), or that a hungry owlbear is stalking the party (something is following you), or a number of other possibilities. Did you prepare a handful of different ways to encounter each monster on the random table, or just make it up at the moment?

I have been inspired by these posts and am considering running a West Marches style campaign. I am having trouble with developing a map, though.

As you never posted the player’s map or your own map, I am sort of lost, using only your advice and descriptions. However, from that it sounds like you made areas that are only five or so miles in size. Settings that have “minecraft” design (forest to plains to desert to plains to tundra in the span of 2 miles) destroy my suspension of disbelief. How big were the areas in your campaign and did it have a “minecraft” design? If that is the case, I’ll go with a more traditional 6-mile per hex hexcrawl.

@ Ed: I think it worked pretty much as you would expect. If we (the players) had heard about a place before finding it (someone says that there’s a small forest in the north called Centaur Grove) then that’s what we’d call it. If we just found something we’d name it something or maybe just refer to it by description “those ruins out by the lake in the north”. If we then discovered a better name from it from exploring or something then we’d start calling it that; or keep calling it by our name if we liked that better.

I’m pretty sure that there’s things that we named and never found out the actual name. And I’m also sure that Ben has a ‘true’ name for those things, we just never discovered it.

Out of curiosity, if players were the first to discover a location, such as the Horned Tower, did the players name the location? Or did they discover the location’s ‘true’ name while exploring it? Was it ever the case that you gave a location one name (for your records) but the players called it something else after they’d discovered it? Thanks.

Really though I think all of that boils down to this: We never expected things in the game to be “fair” (i.e. “level appropriate”) – we expected them to make sense and fit into the game world. It was our job as players to make sure the encounters were level appropriate.

I feel like I should chime in here, being the PC who died in the “second Hydra” incident that Ben mentioned. In that case I felt that it was pretty obvious, even while it was happening, that we (me especially) had rushed in foolishly (“hooray, we killed the hydra!! Let’s rush into its lair and search for treasure!”), were getting caught with our pants down, and needed to run like mad (which we immediately tried to do). It was probably the least telegraphed big danger I can remember, but nobody felt that it was ‘unfair’.

Thinking about what made me not get upset with Ben when I died and accuse him of unfairness or somesuch:

1) It made sense and was reasonable in the circumstances; even if there was crucial info that we didn’t know when we rushed into the cave.
That is, it didn’t really seem likely that there was a second Hydra hiding in the cave nearby during the fight with the first one, but as we entered the cave it was pretty obvious there was something more going on, even before the other Hydra appeared. When the hydra did appear that made it very clear what was going on and _it made sense_ even if there was no way I would have guessed that that would be what was going on before that. And anyway I should have been much more paranoid about going into any cave like that.

2) Lots of little things reinforcing the feeling that Ben was an impartial/passive arbiter, e.g. the GM rolling all the dice out in the open. All of the “West Marches” style of play helps reinforce this (players deciding where to go on their own and so forth), but there’s also things the GM can do during the game to emphasize their impartiality.

3) Lots of precedence for things being potentially very dangerous, often surprising, and not tuned for your current level .
For example a very early bit in a game involved a 1st level character crawling into a barrow mound that the group had come across on their way to somewhere else, to do a little grave robbing. Sure enough there were a couple of Barrow Wights – definitely not a 1st level encounter. It was pretty obvious what was happening and the PCs fled immediately. That sort of thing (with the players & PCs retelling it to others) made sure that we all knew very well that there were scary things in that dark hole or on the other side of the door (heck folks were even scared of the doors themselves). I remember most of us veterans making sure to explain to new players that this was a very different play style so that they would get that from the beginning. I think with everyone feeling that the world was generally a very dangerous place that was not tuned for their level at all, we were all generally very aware of the risks we were taking. Of course despite that we would still frequently do “a little light exploring” just before camping for the night or heading home; because that’s where the fun was.

I’m not even sure that clues or signs that dangerous things are up ahead is important for this. If things make sense and are consistent then that should usually provide the clues the players need, and as the GM you should make sure to think about those things (“given that there’s a hydra in this area what would that mean…”). But they should also know that sometimes there are surprises.

Really though I think all of that boils down to this: We never expected things in the game to be “fair” (i.e. “level appropriate”) – we expected them to make sense and fit into the game world. It was our job as players to make sure the encounters were level appropriate.

In West Marches there was an running joke about “a little light exploring.” That was a code word for “well we’re low on hit points and spells, but rather than rest like we should let’s push on and explore a little more territory because what could go wrong?” It was the players joking to themselves that they were about to do something potentially stupid and get themselves killed. They key was that they knew they were being unwise so could hardly be grumpy when they got in over their weary heads.

The short answer is no. Not that I can remember anyway. The hydra is probably the closest (by which I mean the second hydra) but in hindsight the players were smacking themselves in the heads and wishing they’d put up defensive spells before walking into the scary cave lair.

A very valuable skill (possibly the most valuable skill) is knowing when it’s time to run away. Very, very fast. Including creatures that pursue is actually a far more dangerous design decision than simply making dangerous creatures that players could flee. In West Marches the goblins of Cradle Wood were generally recognized as being far more dangerous than their stats indicated because they did mob-up and chase intruders, often for days on end. The other epic example would be the Brood of the Standing Stones. They led to one of the most nailbiting sessions in the entire campaign because killing one put a blood curse on the slayer that drew vengeful Brood from miles around. Nightmare.

I think it’s also very useful to mentally review your own GMing. When you look back on things from the players’ point of view clues that seemed obvious to you might have other interpretations. When you get into the zone of thinking “oh clearly they should have seen the signs!” you are in danger of potentially punishing what you perceive as bad tactical decisions. I’ve caught myself doing that.

If a particular player is repeatedly grousing about the injustice of the world a West Marches game might not be for them.

But yeah, sometimes you step into more than you bargained for. Sometimes there’s no way you could have known to avoid it. That’s life. Run.

I do have one more quick question; can’t quite fit it on twitter so I figured I’d ask here.

During my time running West Marches (~70 games over the course of ~10 months sometime last year or so) I caught flak a few times from players who believed I had created something unfair – commonly that it was too powerful. Of course these were baseless claims – the things I had made were basically by-the-book level appropriate and the fact that the PCs had died was their own fault for ignoring obvious foreshadowing of the dangers ahead (like being basically out of HP and literally announcing aloud that they were going to press on to find the big bad ghost in charge of all the less-bad little ghosts… yeah… not a smart move, that).

This got me wondering, though, if appearing passive didn’t really help me in avoiding the blame for players being stupid and getting themselves killed, how did it go on your end? Was there ever a time where somebody called shenanigans on something you had created that they had unwittingly stumbled into? Did you ever take the blame instead of the world because, ultimately, you were the creator of the world? Why do you think this kind of thing might happen?

@TheHydraDM: Ability scores were rolled straight but with swapping one pair. It became clear that lucky rollers had an unfair advantage so after a while I instituted an XP bonus based on how low your scores were. Weaker ability score characters got more XP.

Encumbrance etc were straight by the book (D&D 3e). There was a ton of overland travel and forced marching so it mattered a lot. People were constantly taking subdual damage. It was great to have other attrition meters instead of just HP (same with ability score damage).

Hey Ben, with the work I’ve recently been doing on West Marches I have a question (which I posed on twitter but you rightly suggested would be better recorded here):

Did you generate characters with point buy or with dice rolls? Or both? I could see it working either way with the theme of the campaign (point buy is more gamist, dice rolls are more simulationist, and WM mostly supports both per the articles), but I was curious about the way you did it.

Bonus question: how did you manage encumbrance and equipment? Was it very by the book D&D or was there any sort of unique approach to reduce time spent managing your inventory?

WM sounds like a lot of fun. I’m currently setting up something like it myself, this long tale’s been quite informative in doing so. I’m using Pathfinder. There’s a couple of things I wonder about how to handle;

1) navigation; the DCs for the survival checks aren’t really all that high. How do you handle that? What sort of actions do people roll them for?

2) PCs that start at levels above 1; do they get some sort of Wealth By Level?

Finally, FINALLY, after about a year in the back of my mind, a West March of my (our) very own is about to go down. Wooo! I’ve read and re-read all this at least two times (although the last time was a few weeks back) and come up with some things of my own as well. I do, however, have a few things I’d love to get your thoughts on…

First of all is the issue of more than one GM. There are three of us that are going to be GMing, which was the idea even before we locked onto the WM-concept as the next step for the group. I thought a bit about having all three of us GM the same world, but I don’t think that’d be very fun for the three of us, as we’d 1) have to do everything together, and 2) we’d know everything, all the time, which might be very boring. I’ve also thought about having three separate world, one each, all adhering to the same rules (ie. treasure tables, survival checks, etc.), and this is what we’re leaning towards at the moment. We thought about having one West March, a South March and a North March, so to speak. A little more problematic part would be the lore of the world… Do you have any other ideas or modifications on those two I’ve mentioned that could make multiple GMs work in a WM campaign?

Another question has to do with booking a session and the logistics. What we’re thinking about now is doing it all over a Facebook Group. Anybody would first check with a GM on a date they want to play, and then post that date to the group once they got the OK from the GM. But how do you decide who gets to go in those cases where more than 4 (which we think would be the ideal group number) show interest? First-come first-served seems a bit weak, seeing as it’d just be who logs in to Facebook the most. How did you guys do it, did you even have this problem?

Lastly (for now!), about naming stuff and previous cultures. Did every zone/place have a name that the GM came up with, or was it purely from the players that the names came? How would that work with possible library-searching or asking the local priest in town about those ruins that looked like a church down in zone X? I can sort of see that places having a name makes sense on the original map the players but (just the closest zones, maybe?) but what about subsequent zones and places inside them?

@ hangarflying: GM decides on a case-by-case basis, usually as part of the email discussion planning the session. If there’s no overlap, like in the case you described, group B would be playing in the same time group A already played, so long as they plan on going somewhere different (so there’s no chance that the events in either game would interact).

I also required characters to take some downtime between sorties, just because that’s human nature: if you are out risking your life for a week, spending a couple of days resting in town is reasonable (players forget their characters need rest). That also staggered sorties.

Sometimes I would advance the clock just because we needed to move on. If you hadn’t played, you lost the chance to adventure during that time. “Time waits for no lazy PC.”

The one thing I don’t understand is the advancement of the in-game calendar.

For example, during the first session, you meet with four players and the adventure for an in-game period of two weeks before returning to town.

During the next gaming session, you meet with four different players; has the in-game calendar advanced for them as well, or do you set the calendar date of the second group to be the same day (or perhaps a few days later) as the first group?

I am wondering if the players only had an optional upkeep, and magical treasure was relatively rare, I also assume they could not whatever magical items they liked in town. What could they spend their money on besides these taxes? Doesn’t this system devalue gold and give casters an even greater advantage over fighters than before?

I generally put the dice in the player’s hands. Make a Wilderness Lore check, 15 means you keep even, 20 or more means you’ve given them the slip, etc. But yeah, deciding those DCs is arbitrary but informed by the situation. Some chases were short, some were drawn out over days of cat-and-mouse with a variety of checks (you elude them but you’re still in their territory so they’re prowling the area for intruders, roll Hide, roll to cover tracks, roll to detect if they’re near).

I suppose my question was more did you sort of adjudicate it by ear (“I think this thing would chase them with reasonable success up until they get to here and then it would give up” or “I think this thing will catch them over the next two hundred feet because it’s faster than them and not wounded”) or were there discrete mechanics you utilized (“Well it’s faster, so that gives it a +2, and it’s willing to chase them forever, so that’s another +2…”)? I ask because I sort of can’t help feeling that adjudicating it by feel is too arbitrary, but at the same time if I try to set up something that uses dice it inevitably gets very complicated by virtue of the plethora of factors you talk about.

Did you pick one way or the other, or did you find a happy medium? If it was mechanical what sorts of mechanics were involved? I know you haven’t been too big on handing out “here’s exactly how I did it complete with an example” for a lot of elements, but I’ve been after a good way to handle the heroes running away from monsters (and determining the success or lack thereof) for really as long as I’ve been playing traditional GM’d RPGs, be it full of mechanical elements or else simply a reassurance that using my best judgment is the way to do it.

There are so many different variables. Speed is one, but more important are motivation and territory. Is the creature the kind of thing that has a reason to chase? Does it clearly have an advantage? Is it unwounded? Is it chasing within its turf or crossing into unfamiliar terrain?

Creatures that would leave their own territory were potentially terrifying. In West Marches, goblins and wolves would chase you all day long in Cradle Wood, and probably into the Moors, but if you crossed the pass or went into different terrain they were drastically less likely to follow. But the game where PCs tangled with the Brood at the Standind Stones and then got stalked all the way back to the very gates of town was nerve-wracking. It remains one of the legendary retreats.

Hey, HydraDM from twitter here. I had a question: you mention running away was a key aspect of this campaign, as was maintaining a simulation-type feel. Try as I might, though, I cannot for the life of me find or figure out a way to simulate running that isn’t ridiculously overwrought and bulky.

I did have some thoughts so far (such as how speed should be a factor, but not the only factor – Spirit of the Century has chase rules making mention of how most chases aren’t decided by speed and I pretty much agree with that), but I was wondering how you handled it? No need to reinvent the wheel if I don’t have to, you know?

Is there such a thing as too *many* players? It looks like that may happen with my upcoming game.

Congratulations and beware..!!!

Yes, definitely. It’s supply and demand: if there are too many players you’ll have a harder time running enough games to let everyone play as much as they want. It totally depends on how often your average player wants to play versus how much you can GM. And if you let too many people play in one session, no one has fun (or everybody has less fun). We had a few eight or nine player games and they were pretty chaotic, so I capped party size unless there was some really good reason.

Think of how often you’re willing to run games. Say it’s once a week. If you’re willing to have an average of five players per game, you can accomodate 5 players in your pool if they all want to play every week, 10 if on average they’re happy to play every other week, and so on.

In other words, the GM has to be willing to play (player pool / 5) times more often than the average player does. Of course a teeny bit of over-demand is not so bad. Keeps the competitive spirit. But too much can lead to serious bad blood.

I had a waiting list to join for a lot of the campaign. There’s always the urge to bring in more people and share the fun, but sharing too much waters down the fun.

Great system. My dad raised me on 1st edition D&D as an ‘interactive storytelling’ from the age of 3. As I grew older I was able to participate in his real sessions which can only be described as open sandbox with a lethal reality. To this day I still prefer this style to all others.

I’m contemplating a ‘West Marches’ style and was wondering if you could pass along your large map as well as the contract you had all of the players agree to. I love the idea of a fractal map and have recently begun to use the ‘Fractal Mapper’ software to build my map for the setting.

I’ve had the pleasure of looking over a copy of the Microscope game. Have you thought of using that system to develop the campaign setting background for a setting they would later roleplay in? Great free-form system.

@ Mike: I made the maps in Illustrator, but during games I had paper printouts and just drew a line to plot the course the party was taking each hour of the day. So I always knew exactly where they were even if they didn’t. Make a little dot when they camp, put a date beside it if you want, then draw another line as they start marching the next day.

Ben,
Thanks again for writing this all up! I am hoping to kick off a west marches style game this weekend.

You said you used “just an open terrain map where I drew vectors to keep track of where the party was” and “I didn’t use hex maps, just free movement and distances”. It seems like you also mentioned zooming in and out.

Did you use vector mapping software, or was this just plotting vectors on a gridless paper map? If you used software, what did you use?

First of all, a homemade, chocolate chip cookie to Ben for not only writing this up but also for continuing to answer comment questions years after the fact. A big pat on the back to everyone that contributed to ideas and posted links to their similar campaigns. That helps me out alot mainly because….

I have only run 2 campaigns so far so I am a fledgling GM. Vampire the Masquerade and now Pathfinder…Both were prepublished modules (NY by Night and _I still can’t believe they talked me into this_ The World’s Largest Dungeon). That 2nd one is the price I pay for being the most knowledgeable player of the group after our previous GM’s left for one reason or another. If you want to play, someone has to run it

I think I may try to steer my group towards this Western Marches/sandbox style as it is the style of play I am most used to. I first got into RPGs many years ago and had more fun playing in these style games than following plotlines and over-arcing stories.

I have read through the pages plus all of the comments on each of the pages and put together a good listed of tips and things to look out for. Especially since I only have a 3 player pool right now. But if they pass along the word to others, maybe (hopefully) it will grow. My planning begins tomorrow…

I just came across this and it resembles (in some ways) a game I played until for a while. We did that one in 1ed with the vast majority of XP coming from treasure and not from monsters, which changes the dynamic a lot. I wonder how much of the dynamic in your campaign came from XP coming mostly from killing monsters and how much it would change if monsters give a pittance of XP and getting gold is where XP comes from.

I’m so glad I found this, the game I’m running is a mixture of this and a normal campaign, and the tips here will help. One large campaign world with a West Marches feel to it, where it could either go story-driven or sandbox depending on what the players choose. I’m not sure exactly how it’s going to end up, but I’m excited to give it a try and see where the players decide to go with it, so I might just be back asking for tips.